After
by thecrownlands
Summary: Spoilers: A Storm of Swords After the events of the Purple Wedding.


The king was bundled up unceremoniously on the floor, his throat torn halfway through and his brilliant blue eyes frantically flicking on the brink of life and death. His hands felt heavy and wet with his own blood, and he pathetically tried to lift them from the cold stone floors. His chest burned as if it would never stop heaving under his tightly tailored clothing. There were hands moving all around him, people he knew, people he didn't, and the black was slowly encroaching upon the corner of his vision.

"Stop the bleeding," he thought, an unearthly silence buzzing into the room, "Stop it."

The crowd shuffled viciously around him, and from his feeble position on the floor he caught sight of his mother. She was screaming, crying, gripping at a dark shape, but Joffrey could not hear a thing from her. Whatever lay in her arms seemed wispy and floaty, no distinct shape to it. He whined, trying to call out, but his lips refused to form a word. It pained him, seeing her in her state of insanity. She was whipping her head back and forth, screeching at anyone who dare come close. Stewards and guests ran across his vision, their legs blocking his view and coming dangerously close to his eyes. Then her gaze settled upon a remarkably small man who had hung back a few feet from the mêlée.

His hands suddenly became slick upon the floors, staining the tiles with rivers of red, and he pushed himself off the ground as fast as his worn body allowed.

"No," he rasped out, unsteady on his feet, "What-"

Then he froze, breathing pained and shock patterning across his blood-stained features. Reaching a hesitant, shaky hand to his head, he felt the Iron Crown still sitting firmly in its place.

The exact same crown was out of place on the floor next to Cersei, toppled over on its prongs.

He paused to compose himself, gaze not moving from the duplicate crown on the ground as he loosely tied back his hair in its usual leather strip. Something was not right, and it hung in the air like the silence that should definitely not be there. Crouching down to retrieve the copy crown, his fingers passed straight through the strangely transparent metal as if it were no more than a projection.

He raised a hand to his ripped neck, breathing slowly returning to a normal pace, and a feeling of calm and dread washing over him in swirls.

His mother couldn't see him.

No. No she couldn't.

He laughed once, eyes deadened, the corners of his mouth wrought up in fear and realisation. Stumbling over his feet and clinging to the huge, dark wood table that ran the length of his hall, he felt slight relief in the fact that he could still feel it. He let his eyes wander restlessly and rested his shoulder on the hard back of a colossal chair. Joffrey pretended not to see the washed-out figures of his family and court, even trying his hardest to ignore Margaery's beautiful form as she fell to the ground next to Cersei, gripping the crown from the ground, whispering frantically to whatever gods she'd based her faith in.

He couldn't help himself. He wanted to reach out to her, to hold her, to tell her he was there. She'd only been offered to him as a ruse for the Tyrells to hold the throne, he knew, but right now that talk seemed like the most trivial thing in the world. He'd kidded himself into thinking she loved him. She did. Of course she did. Wasn't there at least one person who had truly loved him? What a fool he'd been.

So much wasted time.

"It doesn't matter," he told himself, pulling himself up from the side of the chair and stepping straight through the moving forms of his wife and mother, his sister looking seemingly traumatised between them.

Straight he walked, adjusting his crown as he went, footsteps echoing the entire length of the huge hall. People stood like veils in his sight, but he passed through them without a thought. There was definite light passing through the long gap down the centre of the great doors, the giant barricades that stood as the far wall to the sweeping ceilings.

Through the panicked crowd he strode, every single one of them facing towards where he had left, trying to catch a glimpse of what had occurred. They were nothing more to him now than obstructions.

A dulcet tone sounded throughout the hall as he pressed his hands to the heavy wood doors, a sound which he immediately recognised as the first, low tone of a bell. How was he hearing that? He couldn't hear the living around him. The toll faded softly away as he gritted his teeth and shoved the doors open as hard as he could, throat burning with the effort, hearing the bang as the wood collided with the stone on either side.

He felt blinded. The sun hit him straight into his eyes yet he stood unflinching. A few seconds he could not see, then the world faded back into place.

He was met with riots.

Thousands upon thousands of Westerosi people, transparent in the sun, screeching that which he could not hear nor comprehend. No one's gaze was directed at him. They were all throwing stones, rocks, pebbles at the barricades which must be seemingly closed to them.

The young king was dead. No other time had the bell tower sounded as it did now.

A second toll, and Joffrey found himself striding faster than he thought he could run. Each footstep seemed a bound, and he rushed down the wide marble stairs and onto the common ground. Once met with the crowd, he did not stop. A white stone path had almost been unknowingly cleared, a ten foot gap between the several parties of angry people that allowed him to run without a single veil to cloud his eyes. No one could see him. No one looked at him. He wanted to get out of King's Landing, away from what used to be his life. He could almost see the sea at the end of the throng of rioters.

A third toll, and his back was on fire. Pain coursed through his spine, forcing him to stumble, choking, to the ground. His cheekbone smashed heavily against the rock pavings, jarring his teeth but doing no damage. The world was too bright. Something foreign ripped mercilessly through the skin of his back, like an axe carving holes into his flesh, forcing its way out behind his shoulder blades. His entire being felt broken and inflamed. Joffrey's ice blue eyes flashed gold, his perspective swimming in front of him, and he instinctively shut them, wordlessly screaming into the dirt-ridden stone.

A final rip and his spine snapped into place, throwing his head back and forcing him to rock up onto his knees. Quickly, he threw a foot out in front of him to steady himself, and rested his arms on his leg. To anyone else, it would have looked as if he was forswearing an oath.

A strange weight was now bearing down on him, the last of something still pushing through his skin, though not in an entirely unpleasant way. The agony he'd felt had relaxed into a dull throb, hardly enough to even call an ache.

He turned his head, and his body turned with him. The bells had ceased to toll. The mob was still there, transparent as they were.

He was in an empty world, it seemed.

Joffrey stood slowly, feeling unbalanced and clumsy. His shirt hung in tatters at his waist, and expensive material fluttered to the ground. He paid it no heed and found that his centre of gravity was way off. Learning he had to lean forward to even stand straight, he became aware of a breeze that was definitely not there before.

Slowly, he spun, checking his shoulder. Some fifteen metres away, a faint gold, fractured light dragged with him when he stood.

He twitched his shoulders and felt a massive wave of weight ripple behind him.

He wished he could simply crane his neck to see whatever it was that was backpacking him down, but his gashed throat wouldn't allow him such a thing. His shoulders were feeling warm, but not hot, and there was something brushing on his back that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Whatever it was would definitely not fit back through the gate, so his only option of a mirror would be the huge polished brass metal doors of the tailors.

It was a short walk, he found, and he was thankful for it. It gave him time to relearn his balance, to keep himself on his feet, and to process the fact that whatever this was, he couldn't go back to living.

Less than a corner away, a pair of shaded figures reappeared in the streets, and this time Joffrey could make out what they were saying. He didn't hinder himself by stopping to listen, but as he passed them, he overheard.

"D'ya know why everyone's off to the Sept, kid?" The larger figure had monotoned, sucking unamusedly on a pipe, watching the other fashion a horseshoe on the old coals of a metal barrel.

"The king's gotten murdered, that's why they're tolling the bells for 'im," the younger male figure replied, happily conversing as he worked.

"But you, you're stayin' back here. We ain't going to sell things if we ain't got things to sell."

Joffrey hurried past them. Of course they had tolled the bells for him. For the dead, sorry king, whom nobody cared for anyway.

Upon reaching the tailor's door, he found himself no less than shocked. He covered his mouth with his hand, biting down on his skin to stop himself from screaming at the initial reaction.

Where he had expected some sort of 'deathly burden', he had instead been carrying the exact opposite.

Tiny, delicate, patches of light lined his shoulder blades, blending outwards into a sort of yellowish-white dull glow, which layered in a sort of an elegant shape. From that point, enormous, at least 20 metre long hawk-like golden wings hung like banners behind him, looking strong but undeniable fragile. When he shifted his weight even an inch, a rain of white-hot embers shook from the bottoms of the colossal, fiery feathers. It was terrifying how light they were for their size.

How was his small body even supporting beasts of such a size? They were undeniably beautiful, but they horrified him, no less. They must have towered at least two stories high, and the length was astounding. It was if they had been ripped straight off a phoenix, or a deadly, fiery bird of prey.

He reached a hand behind his back to touch them.

Immediately he darted it back. They were burning hot, like metal that had been thrown upon coals. They looked like they were burning, too, as if the bottom of each feather was lit with magma and ash. A sharp, harrowing contrast with his eyes, he noted, that he wasn't sure was pleasant.

He looked quite the strange picture, there in front of the tailor's, with the pair of ethereally hell-given wings that flared out behind him. He looked so small, so scared and insignificant next to the huge falcon-like additions.

If anyone else was to see him, his blonde hair whipping around his face in the breeze produced by the wings, the torn, indefinitely bloody neck and his immortalised crown perched golden on his head above icy eyes, they would have run.

He looked like a beautiful version of death himself.

Frightened. He attempted to bring a sense of confidence to himself, but his eyes still shook and his hands stayed unsteady.

He was dead. He knew it, and scared to the point of waking when it dawned on him that all he had worked for, all he had done, all those hours at his father's table, spending nights with his court finding ways to bring up the money for the huge debt he'd left behind. All the years he'd been pining after simply something to do, occupying his time at repetitive events and tournaments, waiting for the day when he might just end up with some responsibility.

Cersei, Margaery, his family, and the projected friendships he'd been taught not to trust- they were all people who were back at the hall, pretending to be distraught at the passing of the king. Then, they would simply get over it. They would place his empty body in the Great Sept, buried with objects he would never need to use, spending ages mourning over nothing but a shell. How stupid it all seemed now.

And it was all for nothing.

He gave his shoulders a twitch, tried rolling them, before discovering that the massive wings had controllable joints of their own. Walking away from the makeshift mirror, he practiced the rhythm on the ground before deciding that he was dead anyway.

Suddenly the streets were alive with people, each seeming slightly more solid than the last. He could hear them talking, and none of them noticed him.

Not a single one.

After standing there, observing the new crowd, he drew himself into the middle of the street, flexing his shoulder blades and feeling completely devoid of any emotion. Where would he go from here? Travel the seven kingdoms by his lonesome?

Unbeknownst to him, there were others out there. Passed-on royalty like himself, but all were walking, riding dead horses or talking with deceased children. What he believed he was in was a world of the unfortunate, people who had died young or died in fame, and somewhere, across the seas, in many a decade's time, he would find dragons. The same ones killed in war many, many years ago. He would wander, waiting for his dead family to join him, which they never did. Everything about him was simply unchanging.

Little will he ever know, that the Gods saw so much evil within him, yet so much good, that neither Hell nor Heaven would agree to hold him, and so they threw his spirit back into the world. The creator of the middle layer, where neutral souls would spend eternity. He would witness the lands split, the seas rise, and a new age appear in which great metal planes disrupted his path in the sky, where Casterly Rock fell into the ocean and King's Landing became no more than a Grecian village on the side of a continent.

He looked about at present on the now-crowded street, seeing the transparent living go on about him.

A young girl passed with her father.

"Why do they have bells for the dead?" She asked. The father covered her mouth and hissed the word 'respect' to her, pulling her hand for her to move away from the crowd.

"Because," the father replied quietly, tugging her along, "Every time you ring a bell-"

Joffrey threw himself into the air.


End file.
